COMMENT: We are sad­dened by the pass­ing of Charles Higham, author and Hol­ly­wood biog­ra­pher whose work included a very impor­tant foray into the Nazi Fifth Col­umn in the West, includ­ing and espe­cially the U.S. indus­tri­al­ists and financiers who backed the Axis pow­ers of World War II.

EXCERPT: Charles Higham, a pro­lific celebrity biog­ra­pher whose books drew vast atten­tion for their mem­o­rably vast claims (Errol Flynn was a Nazi spy, Howard Hughes played a cen­tral role in Water­gate), died on April 21 at his home in Los Ange­les. He was 81.

His death, appar­ently of a heart attack, was announced on Wednes­day by his friend Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic of The Hol­ly­wood Reporter.

Mr. Higham (pro­nounced HYE-um), who began his career as a poet, wrote some two dozen biogra­phies, whose sub­jects included Katharine Hep­burn, Mar­lene Diet­rich, Bette Davis, Rose Fitzger­ald Kennedy, Cary Grant and Orson Welles. . . .

. . . But none sent brows quite as high as “Errol Flynn: The Untold Story” (1980), in which Mr. Higham asserted that Flynn, who died in 1959, had spied for Ger­many dur­ing World War II. Though crit­ics faulted the book for build­ing a deduc­tive chain not expressly com­pelled by the evi­dence, Mr. Higham defended his methods.

“I don’t have a doc­u­ment that says A, B, C, D, E, Errol Flynn was a Nazi agent,” he said in an inter­view with The New York Times the year the biog­ra­phy was pub­lished. “But I have pieced together a mosaic that proves that he is.” . . .

. . . . His other books include “Trad­ing With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933–1949” . . .

Discussion

2 comments for “RIP Charles Higham”

I attribute much of my own awak­en­ing to “deep pol­i­tics” to the books of Mr Higham and Dave’s Mag­num Opus “How the US Lost WWII”.
RIP Mr Higham.

In pos­si­bly related news, researcher Peter Lev­enda was on “Coast to Coast AM” last night dis­cussing his book on “Hitler’s Escape”. Worth a lis­ten if you can access the stream. Dave also did a show about this a while back which I think was called “Escape of the Wolf”(??).